A Fugitive's Comfort
by Foul Fountain of Flies
Summary: The nights when she couldn’t sleep are also the nights when she’d feel most at ease. Pain, Nagato, Konan friendship fic. Introspective prose. One shot.


A Fugitive's Comfort

Disclaimer: I'm poor and have virtually nothing in my name. And if I happen to own Naruto and its characters, I'd be bragging up a storm about it. As it is, nope. That just doesn't make any sense.

Summary: The nights when she couldn't sleep are also the nights when she'd feel most at ease. Pain, Nagato, Konan friendship fic. Introspective prose. One shot.

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Each time she caught herself awaking to the steady rustles in the nearby thickets she would automatically respond with a quick jerk of the head. At times the snap would be harder than she'd accustomed herself to and her neck would stay stiff for the next few hours. She'd curse herself when, as she observed the sky, she'd realize that the hands of a clock somewhere under a roof had struck several times past her cue, and in panic she would scan her surrounding in the dark as if to pursue its limits, to make sure it hadn't taken anything away from her.

Pain had so many times reiterated his case that he'd just given up halfway. He had grown drastically used to her violent gut reactions that he'd just flap his head a little to the side to indicate that she'd made a mistake. It was just a bunny or if not, a rodent with shorter ears. There was no need to draw her blade or her legion of paper birds to poise an attack on the little animal that committed the error of making the slightest movement. Anyway, he would have noticed it before she even did. In these instances she had more than once suspected that Pain derived humor from nearly getting killed.

Nagato had shared the same speculation with Pain. In a weak voice he'd always try to coax her out of her paranoia, always throwing caution as to what it could do to her already bad nerves. She would hold him in her begrudging gaze for a while and be led into thinking that he'd finally admitted that she was right, but suddenly he wouldn't be looking at her but at the mountains, captivated, a total space case. She had suspected that in these trances he was breathing in the filthy stink that filled the air, feeling that he'd rather smell it than catch a whiff of her words which he was always ready to oppose.

Then she'd accuse them of ganging up on her until they would remind her that they'd cross the border with her because they wanted her on their side, not on the other, in fact not anywhere else. And she'd be only slightly consoled since that couldn't possibly have meant that they'd be more aware of their environment, the danger it poses, onward.

Sometimes, in fact, outside of their knowledge, the world would suddenly seem like a strange place that it became hard to tell danger and safety apart. Like when a hunter had mistaken Nagato's blanketed body for a bear's and was about to plunge a knife into it when she jumped from behind and hurled the poor man away. What do instincts do at a time like that? She'd ask herself. That night anyhow they ended up spending a very late supper with the stranger, trading stories of the wild, but after a while, when the clouds cleared out from the sky to give way to a most star studded evening, it got her reduced to thinking, "What would have happened if I didn't get there in time?"

She would then begin to see things not normally detected in daylight, and one would have wondered at how much she could tell from afar, how much danger she could invent from where she lay in utter silence. If Pain and Nagato found out, she was sure, they would have laughed at her hoarse without thinking twice about her feelings. Indeed, the various types of danger in this kind of lifestyle weren't a joke. Each passing moment it had become harder and harder to learn to survive without getting hurt. It annoyed her, constantly, that she had tried every day and in every single way to persuade her two companions to organize certain measures for safety but failed time and again because these two had never really considered anything less than a full-blown war between two nations a threat. These two took too much for granted, just too much.

As a solution, she had taken care not to sleep at the same time as they did. If she felt as though she was paying for their recklessness, she didn't complain. It had given her a sense of purpose to watch over them and their stuff whenever they were vulnerable. Asleep, for instance. She would accidentally doze off, however, at tired times after rough travels and minor encounters with bandits. And when she rose she'd do so while her heart would beat insanely under her ribcage, afraid that either of the two might have died on her watch. But if anything they were self-sufficient and far stronger than she was, and she could have slept half the day away as they finished her work for her.

She was thankful, therefore, whenever insomnia got to be her guest -a frequent and welcome one-for the night. That way she could do what she intended without getting accused of and diagnosed with a number of psychological disorders. Along with this, she got to hear every pulse in the outer confines of the space they temporarily occupied, and sniff out an intruder if there ever was one. And because the source of her panic was more than she could disclose, her joy at watching them sleep in peace, far away from danger, was just as unspeakable, as insurmountable. Like many others, this was a night she was willing to give up to keep them safe, nights when she wouldn't have to grope in the dark to check if everything in their campsite was just the way it had to be. And when Pain and Nagato opened their eyes first thing in the morning she'd be averting them, fooling them into thinking that she'd just woken up a few seconds before they did. They would nod at her and ask what they'd grab for breakfast and she'd reply, cursorily, as she scrambled about to set their makeshift table. She had prepared, just to be sure, excuses hinting at medical stuff if ever any one of the two bothered to ask about the dark rims under her eyes.

Until then, the scene would cause her to smile inside. Mornings like this one she could almost feel the heat from a cushion on a summer day. Mornings like this reassured her that they could act out the final phases of their lives without parting from one another.

END


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